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Lime Cream
Put the thin rind of four limes and a pint of cream in a saucepan with half an ounce of isinglass and six ounces of loaf sugar. Stir well over the fire, and let all dissolve without boiling. Then add another half pint of cream, and strain into a basin; when nearly cold add slowly the strained juice of the fruit. Stir well again, and when the mixture thickens and is on the point of setting pour it into an oiled or wetted mould. Turn out when cold, and decorate with crystallised fruits.
A set cream in the old style — essentially a lime blancmange, stiffened with isinglass rather than gelatine. Everything depends on temperature control at two moments: the cream must never boil, and the acid juice must go in cool and slowly.
- The hinge: add the juice cold and slowlyLime juice will curdle hot cream on contact. Cool the strained, sweetened cream to barely warm (below about 30C/85F) and trickle the juice in while stirring, or the mixture will separate into grains and never come back.
- Isinglass to gelatineIsinglass is collagen from fish swim bladders, chiefly sturgeon, and is now rarely bought for cooking, though it is still sold, mostly for fining beer and wine. Half an ounce is about 14 g; powdered gelatine is usually reckoned roughly half as strong, so 7-8 g (about 2 1/2 teaspoons, or four leaves) is the common substitution for this volume. Bloom it in cold water first and dissolve it in the warm cream off direct heat.
- Loaf sugarCut from a hard refined cone and used because it was the cleanest sugar available. Six ounces of ordinary granulated sugar (about 170 g, a scant cup) is the same thing.
- Imperial pintsCassell's pint is 20 fl oz, so a pint plus half a pint is 30 fl oz — a little under 4 US cups of cream. Single or whipping cream both work; the set comes from the gelatine, not the fat.
- Thin rindMeans zest pared off with a peeler, no white pith, which turns bitter when steeped. The limes in trade then were probably smaller than a modern Persian lime, so three modern limes may give as much rind and juice as the four called for.
- Do not boilKeep the cream well short of a simmer while the rind, sugar and isinglass dissolve; the recipe gives no temperature, only the instruction not to boil. Boiled cream skins over and takes on a cooked-milk flavour that fights the lime.
- Moulding and settingOil the mould with a flavourless oil, or rinse it with cold water and leave it wet. It needs 4-6 hours in the refrigerator, not merely "until cold"; dip the mould briefly in hot water to turn it out.
- YieldAbout 1 litre of mixture — a 1-quart mould, serving six to eight.
Isinglass, a gelatine prepared from the swim bladders of sturgeon, was the standard setting agent of the English kitchen for well over a century before sheet and powdered gelatine displaced it, and it turns up in jellies and creams. Recipes of this type — cream flavoured, sweetened, set and turned out of a shaped mould, then dressed with crystallised fruit — belong to the family of blancmanges and "creams" that filled the second-course sweet tables of Victorian households, where the visual effect of a cleanly turned-out mould mattered as much as the flavour. Limes were reaching British kitchens in quantity from the West Indies by the later nineteenth century, largely on the back of the naval and commercial lime-juice trade, which is why a fruit that had been familiar in the eighteenth century chiefly in punch and as bottled juice appears here as an ordinary flavouring alongside lemon and orange.